Odds and Ends

School is back.  Crafty has mostly been set aside.  Kitchen adventures are more infrequent.  I assure myself it's only for a season when journal articles take priority over pleasure reading and paper proposals take precedent over blog postings.  Yet, I have accumulated some odds and ends to share....

Best Soup Ever:  Seriously good.  This gets rave reviews on pinterest and for good reason.  It's got all the goodness of lasagna but it's easy and quick to make.  Highly recommend and go big, use the real deal Italian sausage.  Usually I skimp and replace beef with turkey, etc. but go all the way with this recipe.  It's worth it.


Letters:  I tried my hand at yarn letters.  Not as easy as I thought, but a few hours of mindless television later and voila!  I learned the trick to get every edge covered is to use a glue gun - if someone can make the letter completely covered without a glue gun, I would gladly declare them a crafting genius.  I am not sure I am up to making an alphabet of these but they look good for a monogram or an initial.  And this just might be an instance when it's worth whatever someone is charging on etsy.

Fabric Pennants:  I have made these a few time as a great way to use up scrap fabric and get a cute end result.  My dear friend, Barbara, said I do and some pennants I made in her wedding colors graced the dessert table.  It was fun to be included, but as friends who were at the wedding can attest, the dessert table was more like a feeding frenzy than a tasteful  distribution of their wedding treats.  Seriously, I have never seen anything like it - people lost all their manners at the sight of cupcakes and key lime pie.  They didn't even wait for the bride and groom to be served, much less notice the cute penants hanging from the table.  This picture is of the aftermath.

More good soup:  For a girl that lives in the city and loves that I can avoid strip malls for 99% of my life, I love me some Panera.  I welcomed their arrival in DC with open arms.  I like their treats, their company values that compel them to have some stores that are pay what you can and most of all their broccoli cheese soup.  Yum.  This recipe is easy and makes good use of an immersion blender.  I opted for the skim milk (actually lactose free too), and it's also easy to make vegetarian with the replacement of veggie broth in lieu of chicken.  I even took this picture (pre-immersion) because it might be one of the healthiest looking dishes I have made in a long while.  The only thing missing at home is that crusty whole wheat baguette that comes with the real deal.

That's it for now....I try to make good on life, including the crafty, tasty life, not ending during grad school.  So far so good.